in the canons that were made in 1603. Canon 113 deals with the suppression of evil deeds by the reporting thereof by the persons concerned with the administration of each parish. It provides for the presentment to the ordinary by parsons, vicars, or curates of the crimes and iniquities committed in the parish. It concludes with the following reservation: There are two points to be observed in the canon: First, there is an express exemption from the duty of secrecy where such duty should conflict with one imposed by the civil power under a certain penalty. There does not appear to have been, in fact, at that time any law which made the mere concealment of any crime, including treason, an offence punishable with forfeiture of life. This in no way affects the principle laid down in the canon. The exemption is a marked departure from the pre-Reformation ecclesiastical law on the subject as shown by the pre-Reformation English canons and otherwise. Second, even apart from the exemption, the language used to declare the injunction bears a marked contrast to the language used to declare the secrecy in pre-Reformation days. It is evident that secrecy is not quasi of the essence of confession, as William Lyndwood had declared it to be at the time which he wrote. The notion of secrecy as explained by the Fourth Lateran Council, and the English Councils of Durham and Oxford - which made stringent decrees - seems to have been ended by the English Reformation. It results from the Submission of the Clergy Act that a canon is void if it contravenes common or statute law, and, accordingly, it becomes void if at any subsequent period a statute inconsistent with it is passed. It does not seem that there was in 1603 any statute to which canon 113 was necessarily contrariant or that any has been passed since. When we have to decide whether or not it conflicted with the common law it must be remembered that many items of the common law must have disappeared or have undergone considerable alteration by such a change in the whole national life as that which was caused by the English Reformation. Rules of canon law and certain precepts of the Church had, undoubtedly, formed some of the stones in the growing fabric of English common law. So, where the practices to which these rules or precepts